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Institutional Ethics Committees in the Netherlands

Author

Kloot Meijburg, H.H. van der

Bibliographic Citation

HEC (HealthCare Ethics Committee) Forum. 1992; 4(3): 209-217.

Abstract

When, in 1984, the Dutch government added the institutional review
board to the list of federal requirements, the interest in institutional
ethics committees (IEC) began to rise. Decisions to forgo medical treatment,
concern over patients' autonomy and privacy, protective measures,
sterilization, and organ transplantation have posed ethical questions as well.
Within health care institutions people set about to organize around the need
for ethical reflection. Sometimes their efforts led to the establishment of
an IEC, sometimes they found other solutions, sometimes they came to the
conclusion that their efforts were premature. This article is an account of
these developments and their complexity. The data for this essay are drawn
from various resources, but mainly from an extensive research project
completed in 1990 by the National Hospital Institute of the Netherlands.

In discussing the role and position of IECs in the Netherlands, I
shall first explore the existing differences between these committees. My
second objective is to explain how these differences relate to each other and
thus ...